The Americans are coming for British English – but we’re like, whatever

Thanks to the likes of Netflix, the Disney channel and Nickelodeon, it is American media that is changing the UK’s culture, not Europe

A teenage granddaughter arrived for a summer stay. How was she? “I’m good,” she said. “What about you guys?” She didn’t go on to wish me an awesome day, but the message was still unmistakable. A child of the Disney channel and Nickelodeon, a social media devotee, she now belongs to the coming generation who, quite naturally and unthinkingly, speak American English.

Does that matter? Matthew Engel, one of journalism’s great exponents of English English, clearly thinks so. “As we approach 2020, the American words the British invited into their homes are in danger of taking over”, he writes in his new book, That’s the Way It Crumbles. “It has become possible to imagine a time – 2120 would seem a plausible and arithmetically neat guesstimate – when American English absorbs the British version completely. The child will have eaten its mother, but only because the mother insisted.”